In an age dominated by rationing and austerity, the immediate post-War art scene that Alloway experienced in London was inevitably impoverished. However, there was undeniably a belief in the importance of culture by the newly elected Socialist government. Culture had played an important role in the War by giving visual or aural form to the nation's identity and values, and the collective spirit engendered at a time of conflict was carried forward into peace, if measured by attendance numbers at concerts and exhibitions. The Arts Council of Great Britain was established in 1946, the year the Tate reopened. There were close connections between the Arts Council, Tate and other institutions which depended, according to Margaret Garlake, “on the linkage of disparate organization by multiple membership, which was also a system of mutual restraint, a system where power was a matter of nuance, successfully exercised through an informal network of friends and colleagues rather than the more heavy-weight bludgeoning of official positions.” The most powerful and establishment figure was Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) who had been made a Knight Commander of the Bath in 1938. Oxford-educated and from a wealthy family, during the War he was Chairman of the War Artists committee which enabled him to provide patronage to a number of artists such as Henry Moore and Victor Pasmore. In 1946 he became the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford and the Chairman of the Arts Council's Art Panel. He assembled an impressive art collection of his own that ranged from Michelangelo to Cézanne, and included pre-War British art. His taste was similar to John Rothenstein's, Director of the Tate from 1938 to 1964. Like Clark, Rothenstein supported pre-War Modernism so long as it was not aesthetically extreme or uncompromisingly abstract, and he used the Tate's modest purchase grants to plug gaps in its European twentieth-century holdings, rather than pursue contemporary work. The British art establishment did at least introduce continental Modernism into post-War Britain: in 1945–1946 there were well-attended exhibitions by Paul Klee at the National Gallery, Picasso and Matisse at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Braque at the Tate.

Other establishment members in positions of influence took a harder line against Modernism.